Definition of Reality

The X of which the concept of X is the concept, need not be physical. For example, I can have the concept of envy, but envy is mental, and not physical. Or, the number three of which I have a concept, is not physical.

what I mean by that is that the brain creates sun and names it by organising the sensory input it receives and orientating it around a concept (which we all share as we all have the same structure of consciousness).

Yes, I understand what you are saying and have no good reason to argue otherwise. I was having a hard time deciphering what longknowledge was saying, however.



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Kant - Copernican Revolution
Kant's most original contribution to philosophy is his "Copernican Revolution," that, as he puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception. Something like this now seems obvious: the mind could be a tabula rasa, a "blank tablet," no more than a bathtub full of silicon chips could be a digital computer. Perceptual input must be processed, i.e. recognized, or it would just be noise -- "less even than a dream" or "nothing to us," as Kant alternatively puts it.

Our knowledge of the world of our experience is inevitably a knowledge that is constructed through our own frameworks and categories - this gives rise to questions about whether our "knowledge" is anything to do with the "world as it is."

or someone who has eaten a big handful of peyote buttons? I would think those are quite a different type of consciousness than the shared structure of consciousness you refer to

Carbon-dating is a small part of the evidence that, for instance, Earth is far older than people who inhabit it. Another bit of evidence for it is that if Earth did not predate people, please explain how people, who predated Earth, got to Earth. I am sure you can look the rest up. Do you seriously doubt that the evidence that Earth and stars and Sun are older than human beings? Isn't it obvious that the fact that I cannot prove the Pythagorean theorem to a group of two year olds is no fault of the proof of the Pythagorean theorem. And that when I convince middle schoolers with the proof, it is not because they are gullible?

I don't doubt any of the above. The only problem is, Kenneth, you have no proof.

Beg to differ. It is directly relevant. Source; emphasis added.

Sure this is counter-intuitive, may even seem irrational, but this is what Kant said. And it is directly relevant to the question 'what is reality'. As I have said many times, 'reality is not what you see when you look out the window, but you looking out the window'.

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Quite true! Excellent observation. It is exactly from the 'vantage point' of states like this that you can see hoiw reality is indeed both manufactured and conventional. This is one meaning of ex-stasis, 'esctatic cognition'. From 'inside' the conventional reality, anyone talking from the viewpoint of 'outside' it is non-intelligible. But maybe that is the perspective of 'the sage'. Hence my remark earlier that they are often mavericks, outsiders or unconventional thinkers.

I don't doubt any of the above. The only problem is, Kenneth, you have no proof. Carbon dating is dealing with data. Data is dependent on sense perception. People who inhabit Earth are sense perception (apart from our own personal perceptions). Pythagorean theorem is only known to us through sense perception. Can you deny any of this? Sense perception relies entirely on the workings of the mind. Try to describe anything at all (and I mean absolutely anything) without refering to sense perception and what are you left with? The fact is you are left with...........nothing at all!!
What exactly is a stone? It is a collection of data supplied to us through our senses. Sound, taste, touch, smell and sight are all we have and without our conciousness we would not even have these. We have no knowledge of anything prior to our existence (other than what we are told) and we will have no knowledge after we die (unless you are of a religious inclination). Our entire knowledge of existence, including self-awareness, comes from a working of the brain. The brain has been proved, many times, to be less than faultless. If you doubt that consult a good book on psychology. If you think the brain, which is our only contact with what is "outside", is reliable, then what are halucinations? What is schizophrenia? What are dreams? When we dream we see things that are "not real" but we experience them. We feel happiness, sadness, joy and pain. Are these things "proof" of reality? Because we experience them are you saying that they are real? Is that which occurs to us in imagination real?
You can say a stone is a stone because it's a stone from now to eternity, but what exactly is a stone?

They are real mirages, just as toy trucks are real toy trucks. But mirages are not real (oases) and toy trucks are not real trucks. You have to be alert about what the qualifier "real" qualifies. Then there will be no confusion.

Whatever the X is, it is not a construction. Our concept of X is a construction. The Sun, before there was the concept of the Sun was not a construction. It was a hot star.

The confusion between the concept, and what the concept is of, continues, I see.

I'm perfectly well aware of what the word "real" is qualifing in this discussion. The confusion is rather between our sensations and the conceptions that we attribute to our sensations.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, the story, er, theory is that what we experience as a sensation is only the result of a process of reception certain impulses that emanate from a so-called "physical object" by sensory nerves which then send impulses to our brain. How the functioning of the brain results in the sensations we experience is still a mystery.

The association of certain sensations with concepts such as "tree" is the result of past experiences when we first learned to name the sensations. Then we may learn to associate the sensations with the names of other sensations, such as leaf, branch, trunk, etc.

At some point, we may observe (have more sensations) and learn to name more details, such as the internal structure of the leaf, branch, or trunk, and also learn the theories (concepts) about the physiological processes that, in theory, enable the so-called "tree" to sustain itself, grow and reproduce.

Now both the sensations that we have and the names and concepts we learn are real. It's the reality of the "things" referred to by the names and concepts whose reality is in doubt. What we need to examine is: "What is a name?" "What is a concept?" and "What is a thing?" But that's a whole nuther set of threads!

The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality-or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality-or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant's question in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality-real, noumenal reality-is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products. Reason has "no other purpose than to prescribe its own formal rule for the extension of its empirical employment, and not any extension beyond all limits of empirical employment." Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself. Contrary to the "dogmatists" who had for centuries held out hope for knowledge of reality itself, Kant concluded that "[t]he dogmatic solution is therefore not only uncertain, but impossible."

I don't think I agree. I don't think Kant subscribed to the 'correspondence' model of knowledge, where our notions correspond to 'real objects'.

From Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, Ch 2

There is a reason I am quoting Kant in all of this. He was basically a religious thinker, and religious thinkers believe, or see, a level of reality higher than the empirical realm. If your 'definition of reality' is simply what you see when you look out the window, you're a naive realist. There is nothing the matter with that, but let's be clear about the distinction.

so that it would exists even if there were no minds.

Well that is where we differ. I believe the fundamental nature of reality is Mind. 'The universe', as James Jeans said 'seems more like a great mind than a great machine'. And I believe, with the platonists, neoplatonists, and various thinkers from many other traditions, that Mind is the fundamental reality.

Is it not right that we should question even that that we question with?

I agree. The best questioner questions his questioning. There is no answer to the skeptic except necessity and desire. We get hungry or cold and use our prejudices as well as we can.

The well fed and warm can push doubt endlessly. It becomes a twisted sort of poetry.

Rorty writes well on this concerning Heidegger. Western Philosophy didn't necessarily have to become obsessed with certainly and presence, it just happened to.

Does certainty boil down to a feeling? Is certainty more honestly manifested in praxis than theory?

My definition of "reality" is that reality is not an hallucination, or an illusion. Whether what I see is an hallucination or an illusion is another question. Of course, like you, I generally assume it is not, unless I have some reason to think it might be.

Reality is, as I have written before, what is mind-independent, so that it would exists even if there were no minds.

Whether this or that is reality is another issue. I should not assume that what I see when I look out of the window is reality if I have reason to think that I am being tricked, or that I have just taken a strong dose of an hallucinatory drug.

What is reality is a metaphysical question.Whether this or that is reality is an epistemological question.

I am a realist, but I don't consider myself naive.

It may be news to some, but Western Philosophy has not been obsessed with certainty (and presence??) since the beginning of the 20th century. Most English-speaking philosophers nowadays are fallibilists. Of course, I cannot vouch for what goes on elsewhere.

c1897 C. S. PEIRCE Coll. Papers (1931) I. I. iii. 61 Fallibilism..only says that people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning questions of fact. Ibid. 70 Fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy.

Are you a fallibilist? Are you absolutely certain that you are? Yes? No? Either way, get out your swimming trunks and bathe in the continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy, like the rest of us.

:flowers:

Quite true! Excellent observation. It is exactly from the 'vantage point' of states like this that you can see hoiw reality is indeed both manufactured and conventional. This is one meaning of ex-stasis, 'esctatic cognition'. From 'inside' the conventional reality, anyone talking from the viewpoint of 'outside' it is non-intelligible. But maybe that is the perspective of 'the sage'. Hence my remark earlier that they are often mavericks, outsiders or unconventional thinkers.

In a previous post you admitted that mirages are real. I assume that you would agree that other illusions and hallucinations are real as well. But here you deny this.